The men ragged Ernie Wright about his alleged double or doppelgänger on the ride back to Emerald City. Most of it was good-natured, but he turtled up, hunched in the back of the APC in a glowering silence that he broke only once, when Tommy McAfee told him that something must have gone badly wrong with his life, seeing as he'd ended up in the shit, while his doppelgänger had a good job, an education . . .

'That's the point,' Ernie Wright said. 'That guy, he isn't anything like me. So can your shit, McAfee. It ain't right. It isn't even funny.'

After a silence, Ted Brahma said in his doper's drawl, 'Know what they say about your doppelgänger? That it's just like you in every way, but it doesn't have a soul. And it knows that, and it wants one real bad. So if you ever meet it, it's like meeting a vampire hungry for, like, your exact blood type. One look, it can suck the soul right out of you. Turn you into what it was, make itself into you.'